


happiness

by artsyspikedhair



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 2: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Canonical Character Death, Canonical Child Abuse, Dubious Morality, Emotional Manipulation, Legilimency, Lily Evans Potter & Severus Snape Friendship, Mind Manipulation, Occlumency, POV Severus Snape, Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Severus Snape Being a Bastard, Sexual Fantasy, Sexual Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-06 04:21:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19055140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artsyspikedhair/pseuds/artsyspikedhair
Summary: Severus Snape was not a happy man.No, Severus Snape was not a happy man. He was a bitter, angry man who had been coerced into taking a job as a professor to stay out of Azkaban, and his only emotion resembling happiness was the satisfaction he felt when making some dumb Gryffindor feel terrible about themself and end up earning a detention.





	happiness

Severus Snape was not a happy man.

Severus Snape had never been happy, not even in that sunrise period of life where happiness is expected to be so inherent we have a word for missing said happiness (nostalgia). Severus had good reason to be unhappy in that sunrise of childhood - a drunken violent father, a cowardly mum who refused to defend herself or him, the never-ending hunger and disdain a child grows used to when growing up poor in a well-to-do area. Severus Snape was the lurking, awkward kind of boy who was always alone, until a kind girl eventually befriended him out of pity, never learning that the only reason she met him was because he had been following her for months, just jealously watching those painfully _normal_ family interactions he never experienced. 

Growing up with nothing taught Severus he had to steal anything he wanted. Only Severus didn't really grow up with nothing - he grew up with magic, albeit magic his mother refused to use in fear of his father. Magic gave him something to trade with the kind girl: knowledge. He taught her why she could make flowers bloom, taught her the words and rules of this new world she would soon inhabit, and by appearing to be so giving in his knowledge the girl never noticed him stealing more and more of her time, of the time that once went towards those normal sisterly interactions Severus had jealously coveted.

Severus wasn't happy when he befriended the girl because he was still being beaten by his drunken Muggle father. He wasn't happy because he was jealous, a jealousy that only intensified once he and Lily (the girl) began Hogwarts. Severus was jealous of the Gryffindor girls Lily now befriended, of the Gryffindor boys who grew up in entirely magical communities and seemed so much happier than Severus ever could be. Being sorted into Slytherin taught Severus ho ambitious he truly was, butbeing Slytherin also meant learning how to modify that jealousy into something useful. A childhood of sadness and being victimized became an adolescence of anger and being violent. Severus thought he was happy when he was torturing younger, smaller Mudbloods and half-breeds because he had _power_. Vengence wasn't happiness, but Severus had never experienced either before.

He had power and he had his friendship with Lily, only Lily refused to understand Severus' violence, unable to reconcile the quiet boy from home with the bigoted, angry boy in the dungeons. Lily hid her discomfort, chose to believe Severus was maybe reluctant to be committing the acts he was, maybe he was being coerced into it by the other Slytherins. The fact that Severus himself was also victimized by those Gryffindor boys he so envied helped evoke Lily's pity, until the day it didn't. Severus would look back on his friendship with Lily as the only good thing in his life, but her life only blossomed when he left it. She repaired her relationship with her parents, although her sister now resented her for good. Severus fell further and further into the Dark Arts, his bloodlust encouraged and his mind made all-the-more unstable when he joined the Death Eaters at age seventeen, later even taking the Mark that would link his mind with the Dark Lord's, a mistake he would never acknowledge was a mistake.

No, Severus Snape was not a happy man. He was a bitter, angry man who had been coerced into taking a job as a professor to stay out of Azkaban, and his only emotion resembling happiness was the satisfaction he felt when making some dumb Gryffindor feel terrible about themself and end up earning a detention.

* * *

 

Harry Potter was a happy child. He had been miserable and abused for a decade (abuse that was partially Severus Snape’s fault, but he would never face consequences) but he had re-entered the Wizarding World and was ready to start anew. He made his first ever friend the day he turned eleven - Rubeus Hagrid! He read every textbook cover to cover, the only things stopping him from practicing the magic within being that his wand and trunk were locked in his cupboard and he feared Aunt Petunia's wrath. He successfully navigated a month of the Dursley family being afraid of _him_ for a change, managed to enter the platform before the Express left, made his second ever friend (Ron Bilius Weasley), and made his first enemy (Draco Malfoy). He saw ghosts for the first time! He was sorted into Gryffindor with Ron, and was allowed to eat as much as he wanted!

Yes, Harry Potter, one of Hogwarts' newest residents, was a happy child at the moment. He glanced up at the faculty table, where Hagrid waved at him! All was well, until...

"Ouch!"

"You 'kay, mate?" Ron sounded genuinely concerned, speaking through a stuffed mouth.

"Yeah. Hey, Percy, who's that man in the dark robes talking to Professor Quirrell?"

"That's Professor Snape, Head of Slytherin House and the Potions Professor..."

* * *

Dark eyes from the faculty table swept the room, Severus Snape determined to find something to pay attention to other than Quirinus' blathering. Glancing at the Slytherin table, he saw his first years all dining as they'd been trained to in Pureblood etiquette tutoring. Not many surprises in this crop of first years, although Severus did absentmindedly wonder what ambition or cunning Goyle and Crabbe's sons might possess. 

Absolutely against his conscious will, Severus found himself looking over at the Gryffindors. The Potter brat had his hand to his forehead, covering that ridiculous scar but also his eyes from Snape's view. Severus saw another young Potter, newly Gryffindor, "Septumsempra-" "I don't need help from a Mudblood like you-" utter rage consumed the Slytherin at having the memories brought to attention. 

The Potter brat disappointed him even more in his first Potions class, although the Professor had deliberately chosen second year questions as punishment for the crime of existing. If Potter didn't exist, Severus might not even be at this blasted castle, teaching loads of centuar-dung-for-brains the difference between a tadpole and frogs' legs.

No, Severus Snape would find a more suitable punishment for the boy's insolence, arrogance, existence.

And find he did. His hatred grew as Potter managed to charm his way on to the Gryffindor Quidditch team, as Dumbledore cut away at his precious hours meant for sleep by requiring Forbidden Corridor guard duty, as Severus had to save the Potter brat's life-

Professor Snape remembered the humiliation he despised most from his schoolboy days - the sexual assaults. Oh, he had committed his fair share as a Death Eater,but that was against Muggles! To deliberately expose another wizard to that form of nakedness, that- that- 

* * *

 

He began in Harry's second year. The year Lockhart - that buffoon of a man - provided perfect cover by being the poster-boy for pedophile. The attention he lavished on to Mr.Potter was obscene, all going right to the boy's bloated head - and Severus Snape had decided to penetrate that head.

Now, if Dumbledore knew what he did, he might have, as Weasley so eloquently put it, "been sacked." But, Snape well knew that Potter would be ashamed. And he wasn't physically harming the boy - just, a thought of what Snape might look like beneath the robes made its way into the boy's brain. A few well-timed erections - a twelve year old boy had plenty of hormones there anyway, Severus simply used Legilimency to stimulate them right when he was behind the brat's cauldron, earning an oh-so-satisfying blush as the child remained silent to his taunts. Severus Snape was a master, after all, in using psychology to terrorize students, and if anything went wrong, Gilderoy Lockhart would never say no to Obliviating the Boy-Who-Lived, not if Professor Snape added a few Galleons to the deal. And oh, to bring Potter nearly to tears during the weeks when the school threatened and ostracized him, merely by magically maneuvering the boy's imagination as he destroyed potion after potion, the Professor slept better at night having seen what he almost caused. (The blasted brat never truly broke down in class, too stubborn and determined not to give Snape another weak spot for ammunition)

Third year, after Severus was denied a much-needed stress relief by being unable to murder Longbottom's toad, Snape moved deeper. The Dementors left the boy fragile as it was - left the entire castle in a fragile state honestly, even Snape had to stop by Honeydukes and spent nightmares back under Voldemort's wrath - and to break through the child's immediate thoughts, to discover that the boy did indeed have innate carnal desires for men (the Hufflepuff Seeker, specifically, not that Snape cared) and warp them so that Harry would think about the wolf - Professor Lupin, in Harry's mind he's Lupin - in lustful debauched situations. To discover in a detention or the next Potions class that Harry's body had reacted during Patronus lessons, or that Snape was what Harry thought about when wanking, hating himself the entire while, well - were it not for the Marauders bringing flashbacks and fears every un-Occluded moment, Severus might think, at least in his own mind when he's certain he's not being Legilimized, that tormenting the boy brought him happiness. Seeing those green green eyes react with dilated pupils against the child's will, knowing that he, Severus Snape, made the child of Lily Evans think about him in ways he could never force Lily to, Severus reveled in the manipulation.

Then the Dark Lord began rising and Severus was forced into spy-mode, survival-mode, for the foreseeable future - no way to penetrate Potter's mind without risking his own safety, another pleasure forever lost to the war.

* * *

Harry could finally indulge in a sexuality entirely uninfluenced by outsiders - and he did so by not indulging at all. His crushes on Cho and Cedric, he kept entirely child-friendly, though the only child in his mind was him. Harry didn't want to think about that aspect of himself, one that felt inexplicably tainted for no reason Harry could consciously contrive - and at the Dursley's the summer after fourth year he had plenty of time to psychoanalyze his predilection for fantasizing about male professors - so Harry suppressed it. Kept his meat in his pants, didn't wank like the rest of his peers.

Kissing Cho was nice, but that night his mind reviewed those other fantasies of Snape kissing him, touching him, forcibly raping him in front of the Potions class as Malfoy watched.

His mind was all his own, but then Dumbledore suggested Occlumency lessons. Something about Snape's presence in his mind felt eerily familiar...

But nobody would do that, not to a kid, not at age - when did the thoughts start? twelve - not even Snape would Legilimize a nonconsenting child, right? 

* * *

"Look. At. Me."

Memories flooded from Severus' mind to Harry's, but even as he lay, dying from venom, Severus kept up the shield hiding his manipulations of the boy's sexuality. Severus wanted to destroy everything the boy had thought he knew about Professor Snape, maybe even earning the boy's forgiveness someday.

Harry watched his father and Sirius commit some of the acts to Snape Harry had fantasized Snape doing to him. The touching, the stealing his robes, the-

Severus Snape had been a Professor by the time Harry entered his Potions classroom for some ten-odd years. He must've realized there are _some_ responsibilities that come with a position of authority.

"I see no difference." Hermione's teeth had grown past her neck. Okay, maybe not.

Harry would never know of Severus Snape's intrusions of his mind as an adolescent, never for certain.

Right? 

Harry never gathered the courage to ask the portrait, not even nineteen years later, when he became the happy man the happy child was always meant to grow into.

 

 

 


End file.
